AQA 7042 · 2N · R02 - The February⁄March revolution of 1917: causes and course of revolution
This lesson examines why protest in Petrograd became a revolution, how the crisis developed, and why Nicholas II abdicated. It then explains how the Provisional Government and Petrograd Soviet emerged together and produced a system of Dual authority. Following the sequence matters because it separates underlying conditions, immediate triggers and the decisions that turned unrest into regime collapse.
Pressures behind revolution
Russia used the Julian calendar in 1917, 13 days behind the Gregorian calendar used in western Europe. Dates below therefore appear as Old Style/New Style: 23 February in Petrograd was 8 March elsewhere. That is why the same upheaval is called both the February and the March revolution.
Autocracy
A political system in which the ruler claims supreme authority and is not responsible to an elected parliament. Nicholas II remained an autocrat even though the State Duma, an elected body with limited powers, had existed since 1906.
Three kinds of pressure interacted by February 1917:
- A political crisis of confidence. Nicholas had repeatedly bypassed or dismissed the Duma. Since 1915, Duma politicians in the Progressive Bloc had demanded a ministry that enjoyed public confidence, but the Tsar rejected this. Military defeats and poor wartime administration therefore damaged not only individual ministers but confidence in the autocratic system.
- The burdens of total war. Mobilisation removed millions of men from civilian life, the war strained railways and fuel supplies, prices rose faster than many urban wages, and the army suffered enormous losses. Petrograd's problem was especially one of distribution: heavy snow in early February slowed trains and worsened chronic failures to deliver flour and fuel, temporarily closing some bakeries. Bread queues made the state's failure immediate and visible.
- An industrial and social flashpoint. Workers at the vast Putilov works were locked out on 22 February/7 March after an industrial dispute. The next day, International Women's Day, thousands of female textile workers and housewives protested over bread and drew male factory workers into the streets. Their action joined material demands to calls for rights and, as the movement spread, opposition to war and autocracy.
War did not mechanically make revolution inevitable. It amplified old political weaknesses, concentrated hungry and angry workers in the capital, and placed a large, war-weary reserve garrison between the government and the crowds. A short transport crisis could therefore become politically explosive because many people no longer trusted the regime to solve it.
From protest to regime collapse
The speed of events mattered. A protest did not become a revolution merely because it happened first; the decisive change came when the state could no longer rely on armed force.
| Old Style / New Style | Development | Why it changed the crisis |
|---|---|---|
| 23 February / 8 March | Women workers and bread-queue protesters demonstrated on International Women's Day. Male workers joined them. | An economic and gendered protest acquired the scale of a mass movement. |
| 24–25 February / 9–10 March | Strikes spread; more than 200,000 workers were on strike by 24 February, and crowds carried anti-war and anti-autocracy demands. | The movement became a general political challenge rather than a single bread disturbance. |
| 26 February / 11 March | Police and some troops fired on crowds. Nicholas ordered the disturbances suppressed and the Duma's session suspended. | Repression killed or wounded protesters but did not restore obedience; the Tsar also weakened a possible constitutional channel out of the crisis. |
| 27 February / 12 March | The Volynskii regiment mutinied and the revolt spread through the Petrograd garrison; S. A. Smith estimates that 66,700 soldiers had joined by evening. Police stations and prisons were attacked, weapons were seized and prisoners released. | The regime lost its effective coercive force in the capital. Armed soldiers now protected or joined the revolution instead of suppressing it. |
| 27–28 February / 12–13 March | Duma politicians formed a Temporary Committee, while workers' and soldiers' representatives formed the Petrograd Soviet in the Tauride Palace. | Alternative institutions began organising authority while the Tsar's ministers lost control. |
| 1–3 March / 14–16 March | The Soviet issued Order No. 1; the Provisional Government was formed; Nicholas abdicated on 2/15 March; Michael declined to exercise the crown on 3/16 March. | The capital's uprising became a change of regime and created two new centres of authority. |
The events were neither a carefully executed party coup nor a completely directionless riot. National party leaders had not planned the overthrow and many were surprised by it. Local socialist activists helped organise in working-class districts, but women, workers and then rank-and-file soldiers repeatedly pushed events faster than established leaders expected.
Leadership and the Tsar's abdication
The question "Who led the revolution?" has no single-name answer. Leadership shifted as the crisis moved from protest to mutiny and then to a formal transfer of power.
- Women and workers initiated and widened the challenge. The International Women's Day setting gave some demonstrations a conscious political meaning as well as a demand for bread. Experienced activists provided local direction, but no central revolutionary leadership commanded the whole movement.
- Soldiers determined whether repression could work. Once garrison units mutinied, the government could not easily clear the streets or defend its institutions. This changed the balance more directly than slogans alone.
- Duma and socialist politicians organised rival forms of authority. Duma leaders initially hesitated and hoped to restore order; socialist organisers revived the soviet form of elected council. They responded to a revolution already advancing in the streets rather than simply creating it from above.
- Nicholas II narrowed his own choices. Away at military headquarters, he first demanded suppression and suspended the Duma rather than making timely concessions. When he tried to return to his family at Tsarskoe Selo, revolutionaries controlled the railway route and his train was diverted to Pskov.
- Senior commanders and Duma leaders converted collapse into abdication. At Pskov, General Nikolai Ruzsky pressed the case for political change. General Mikhail Alekseev consulted the front commanders, most of whom supported abdication because they feared that continued disorder would destroy the war effort. Duma representatives Alexander Guchkov and Vasily Shulgin then arrived to receive the act.
On 2/15 March, Nicholas signed away the throne for both himself and his haemophiliac son, Alexei, and named his brother Michael as successor. On 3/16 March, Michael declined to exercise supreme power unless a future elected Constituent Assembly chose the form of government and invited him to rule. Romanov monarchy therefore ended in practice after more than three centuries.
This sequence supports a two-level explanation. Action from below destroyed tsarist control of Petrograd; action from above removed the Tsar through a recognisable state act. The generals' pressure was the most immediate influence on Nicholas's signature, but it became effective only because the garrison mutiny and mass movement had made repression and delay extraordinarily dangerous.
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